Then my mother passed … Everything stalled.

She was my closest person. The kind of relationship where you finish each other’s sentences and argue about nothing and call three times a day without a reason. Losing her didn’t just break something in me emotionally. It broke something in my confidence, specifically the professional kind, which was the part I thought was unshakeable.

She was diabetic. And I, her daughter with a nursing degree she was so proud of, misread her for years.

When she started having hot flashes waking up soaked with sweat, I reached for the obvious explanation: hypoglycemia. I rushed her sweets. I was spiking her insulin while she was struggling with something else entirely. I told her to watch her evening diet to overcome her insomnia and disrupt sleep. When her moods shifted, I chalked it up to stress. When her joints ached and her memory fogged and her energy dropped in ways that didn’t fit the pattern I expected, I kept looking at her blood sugar charts. I had a diagnosis I was comfortable with, and I bent every symptom to fit it. She had fatigue I explained away as anaemia. She had anxiety I attributed to her personality. When she complained about stiffness in her shoulder, I blamed her for not being diligent in taking her Vitamin D and Calcium pills. None of it, not one conversation, pointed us toward what was actually happening in her body.

I didn’t understand what I was missing until it started happening to me. Fifteen years later, I have the same shoulder stiffness my mother got, when I honestly thought it was a hereditary trait. Little did I know it is an occurrence in menopausal women; it is so common that it has a name: “frozen blade”.

The moment I became perimenopausal myself, the recognition was visceral and immediate and cruel. This is what she was describing. This is what I dismissed. I had spent years treating her symptoms as isolated data points when they were all chapters of the same story, one I simply hadn’t been taught to read.

That guilt doesn’t have a clean resolution. I’ve sat with the what-ifs more than I’d like to admit. What if I had caught it earlier? What if I’d pushed back on my own assumptions, asked different questions, looked beyond her existing diagnosis? Would her last years have been more comfortable? Would she have understood her own body better, felt less confused, less managed, more seen? I don’t know. I’ll never know. What I do know is that I was the trained one in the room, and the training wasn’t enough.

What’s staggering is that it wasn’t just me. The gynaecologist she saw at sixty had trained in an era when women’s health research barely accounted for hormonal ageing.

The GP who managed her diabetes had no framework for reading her symptoms through a perimenopausal lens. The specialist literature that existed was, and largely still is, fragmented, inaccessible, and written for other specialists. Women my mother’s age, women my age, are walking into clinics with textbook perimenopause and leaving with antidepressants, diabetes adjustments, or nothing at all. The doctors aren’t malicious. They just weren’t trained adequately. Adding salt to the wound, in my environment, women’s hormonal health is culturally unspeakable and symptoms going unnamed because the vocabulary doesn’t exist in conservative contexts.

That’s why BIOPOZ exists.

It is the letter I wish someone had handed my mother. It’s the resource I needed as a nurse before I needed it as a daughter. Every issue will bring together research, clinical insight, and the kind of frank conversation that doesn’t require a medical degree to follow. We’ll cover what’s actually happening in the female body across every decade, not just the reproductive years that medicine traditionally pays attention to. We’ll name the symptoms that keep getting misattributed, the conditions that keep getting missed, the questions you should be asking and the ones your doctor might not think to raise.

My mother deserved better information. So do you.

Welcome to the first issue.

Nissa Kreidieh

Founder & Editor, BIOPOZ